The
MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, founded in January
1970; see below) Altair 8800 was announced on the January 1975 cover
of Popular Electronics. The article, written by Ed Roberts and Bill
Yates, announced that could buy and build a powerful "personal"
computer kit for only $397. The kit included only the parts to build
a case, power supply, an 18-slot card cage (with four slots available),
an i8080-based CPU card, and a memory card with 256 bytes of memory
(not 256k or 256mb, but 256 bytes). The case was painted a
nifty color of "robin's egg blue", playing off of the color
used by IBM in the early 70's on its mainframe computers, so as to
convey that, yes, the Altair was a "real" computer.

Here's an
interesting tidbit I received in an email from Forrest Mims:

"Regarding
the date MITS was founded, our first meeting was in Ed Robert's kitchen
at 4809 Palo Duro, NE, in Albuquerque shortly after my first article
on a model rocket light flasher was published in the September 1969
issue of MODEL ROCKETRY."

"Our
first product was the TLF-1 model rocket light flasher, which
was based on my design."

"We
incorporated in January 1970, each of us providing a $100 check for
startup funds. My check was written in the lawyer's office. It is
dated '16 Jan 1970.'"

"Ed
may have said we began in 1968 because he had founded Reliance Engineering
earlier. We had been talking about starting a company in 1968, also,
but did not have a reasonable product idea until my 1969 light flasher."

In spite of the seemingly limited configuration,
thousands were ordered within the first few months after the article
appeared.

Today computer users and hobbyists express
amazement at the size of this kit, noting that no peripherals were
available and the memory size was limited to 256 bytes. However, the
computer was an "open" system and within a year MITS and
many other start-ups had created expansion cards (primarily through
necessity because of the weak performance of the early MITS memory
boards) to make the Altair a viable computing platform. The "Altair
Bus" that made the expansion possible was later the "S-100
Bus" and later adopted as an industry standard. The S-100 Bus
is now formally known as the IEEE-696 Bus. Unfortunately, MITS' success was short-lived. Ed Roberts sold MITS to Pertec in May
1977. Pertec killed the Altair product line just over one year later
in July 1978. By the early 80's, consumer demand for S-100 based machines
had all but vanished, having been replaced by easier-to-use "micro-computers" from IBM, Commodore, Apple, and Tandy among others.
By the mid-80's, S-100 systems all but
disappeared from the consumer market, but continued in the industrial,
development and business system market for several years into that
decade. At the peak, over 100 companies -- both large and small --
designed, built, and marketed S-100 expansion cards and systems.

Ever wonder where the name "Altair" came from for the 8800? Ed needed
a name and after batting it around for a while with Forrest and Lee
Felsenstein, couldn't come up with one. Ed promptly asked
his daughter, who happened to be a Star Trek fan. At that moment, she
happened to be watching the episode "Amok Time" which among other
things mentions they are on the way to the planet Altair-6 to
participate in the inauguration of the planetary president, being one
of six starships so doing that. The young lady promptly offered up the
name Altair, and it has since became part of our computer history
lessons.

For historical purposes, here are links
to the original two-part Popular Electronics article on the
Altair:

While cleaning out some old magazines, I came across
this article on the 10th anniversary of the Altair. This article, written
by Forrest M. Mims, III, a co-founder of MITS and long-time technical
writer, includes a nice interview with Ed Roberts. For historical purposes,
here is a link to the original Popular
Electronics article.

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